


What Follows

by VampireBadger



Category: The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan (Video Game)
Genre: Everyone dies except Alex and Julia, F/M, Post-Game, Spoilers and referenced deaths, Spoilers for the trailer at the end of the game
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2019-10-05
Packaged: 2020-11-24 14:28:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20909165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VampireBadger/pseuds/VampireBadger
Summary: Julia and Alex leave six corpses behind on a ghost ship--two brothers, a friend, and three pirates. Some people would have been happier if there had been eight corpses there instead of six.And the Curator, as always, is just here to see what happens next.ORThe military covered up what happened on the Ourang Medan once before. They're more than willing to do it again. With forces like that against you, it takes a pretty unusual ally if you want to survive.





	What Follows

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MyDaedricGravemind](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MyDaedricGravemind/gifts).

> I did not get the bad ending where everyone survives and then gets shot by a rescue helicopter, but I can't stop thinking that if the military is that eager to kill off witnesses in one ending, why wouldn't they be trying to bump off survivors in all the other endings? And the survivors are going to have to explain anyone they left behind on the ship somehow, so... this seemed inevitable.

When two officers of the Coast Guard comes to talk to the two of them, they see Julia wrapped up in a borrowed coat two sizes too big for her (and still shivering, because that has nothing to do with the cold), curled up with her feet under her on the uncomfortable chair in the interview room. Next to her, they see Alex sitting in his own chair, leaning over slightly with his hands clasped in front of him, lost in thought but apparently stable, and the officer addresses him first.

It's just the Coast Guard at this point. Just a couple of vaguely confused men that don't know what to make of these two traumatized survivors of what should have been a simple diving expedition. 

Julia sits next to Alex as he stumbles his way through his story--a story she barely recognizes, for all that they'd been together for most of it. She'd known already that the things she saw on that ship are not the same things that Alex saw, but she hadn't realized _exactly _how different it had been until she hears his story under the cold, fluorescent lights of this tiny interview room. She listens and tries to follow as he jumps from one part of the story to another, backtracking, trying his best to explain what no one else will ever really understand. Julia can see from the expression on the faces of the two men that they don't really believe what they're hearing, which is obviously upsetting Alex. 

He tries harder to explain. 

His story gets more incomprehensible.

Halfway through, a third man comes to join them. Julia watches him lean over to talk to one of the two men interviewing them, as Alex continues to address the other. This newcomer looks more serious than the first two, is dressed in something that looks more military than Coast Guard, and Julia strains her ears to catch his quiet words. She hears _confidential_ and _my jurisdiction_, and something in her gut turns cold. She doesn't know what yet, but something is wrong. The two men that had been listening to Alex's story leave, _quickly_, and the newcomer sits down. He reaches over to the recorder the other two had set up while they were questioning Alex, and switches it off. He nods at Alex to keep going, and pulls out a pad of paper to start taking notes on.

It doesn't take Julia very long to notice that what he seems most interested in--what makes his pen move most quickly across the notepad--is Alex's description of the ship itself, what they'd seen, and the old records they'd found there of strange experiments. Julia watches his frown, the tension in his jaw, the look in his eyes. The cold feeling in her gut grows, and a surge of sudden, intense energy cuts its way through her whole body. It feels like an electric charge, and looking back at it later, Julia will hate how easily she'd slipped back into pure survival mode. This man is different from anything they'd faced on the ghost ship, but something in his eyes tells her he's just as much of a threat. More, maybe--unlike most of what they'd seen there, this man is very, very real.

"That's everything," Alex says at last. His voice is hoarse from talking so long, and his eyes are red from exhaustion mixed with grief. Julia imagines she must look pretty much the same. Neither of them have slept since that interrupted night on the _Duke_, and when at last they'd escaped that nightmare ship, alone and afraid, they'd cried together for the brothers they'd lost. For Fliss, too--they'd barely known her, but she'd been one of them, _she'd been one of them_, and they should have saved her. All five of them should have been sailing on the _Duke_. Not just two.

"It's certainly an interesting story," the man says, making a few more notes before continuing. "We might have more questions for you later, but right now I think we should hear Julia's side of the story." His gaze turns from Alex to Julia, and he adds, "It is Julia, isn't it?"

Julia's first attempt at speaking comes out as a croak, and she swallows hard before she manages to say, "Yes, it is." She's been sitting here listening to Alex for so long, that she's almost forgotten that eventually she'll have to tell everything she'd seen, too. 

And what is she supposed to say? If she'd just been talking to the Coast Guard, she would have told the truth without a second of hesitation. Why wouldn't she? They'd seen something awful, but they'd escaped it, and it's over. When they first got here, Julia had been relieved that they could tell someone what had happened, and let them deal with cleaning up the mess they'd left behind.

Now she's nervous. She doesn't like the look in this man's eyes.

"Why don't you tell us what happened?" he says now. "Start from the beginning, and tell us your point of view."

Julia swallows hard again, and Alex reaches out to take her hand. Julia doesn't take it--she's thinking, hard. "Are you okay?" he says quietly.

She snaps her gaze up to the man doing the interviewing. "Does Alex have to be here for this?" she blurts.

"Julia?" Alex asks, sounding confused.

"He's told you his part already," she says, trying to make her tone sound natural. She's trying to sound like she's just a worried girlfriend, not a woman weighing her options for survival. "Alex, you... you look exhausted. You should go lie down somewhere."

"Sure," the man says after a second. He goes to the door to call for someone to come and take Alex. While he's gone, Alex takes the opportunity to lean in close to whisper to Julia.

Quietly enough that only she can hear him, he admits, "I don't want to split up again."

Every time their group had split up on the ghost ship, something bad had happened. They'd all been brought on board together, and gradually that number had shrunk from five down to two. It seemed like every time they left someone behind, they'd found them again later as a corpse.

"It'll be fine," Julia tells him, just as quietly. "I'm just going to tell them what I saw. You don't have to stay here, you should go get some sleep." She gives him a smile that's motivated by survival rather than kindness. There's only one possible way out of this that her tired mind can come up with, and it's not going to work if Alex is in the room contradicting everything she says.

He hesitates but goes, finally, escorted by a Coast Guard member. When the door closes behind them, Julia sits up straight and takes a deep breath.

"Just tell us exactly what you saw," the man says, pen tapping against his notepad. "Your... boyfriend?" He pauses, and Julia nods. "Your boyfriend already told us quite a bit, so we really just need your perspective on it."

"But none of what he told you was real," Julia says. She makes her voice hesitant, confused. She's not sure how good of an actor she is, especially after what must be two full days without sleep at this point. She tries anyway, though--thinks of Conrad's empty, staring eyes, and lets the guilt of not being able to save him rush into every inch of her body. It's the best motivation she's going to get--she can't fail Alex, too. There's only the two of them left.

"Care to explain, a little bit?" the man asks.

So Julia tells him her story. It's not a true story, but it's a _safer _story. She starts off with leaving on the _Duke_, with the dive she'd gone on with Alex, with the first appearance of the trio of pirates and their confrontation with Conrad and Fliss. She explains the pirates' return and their attack on the _Duke _in the middle of the night, and then pauses. This is where Alex's side of the story had first started to sound slightly incoherent, and Julia is going to take advantage of that in a way that would have really hurt him if he'd still been here. She hints that Alex is too stressed out to remember what happened, that he'd been imagining things, that it's probably normal for him to lose track of reality after an experience like that, isn't it?

If Alex had been there, he would have insisted on telling the truth.

Julia needs them to believe her lie.

"They kept us hostage on that boat the whole time," Julia tells him, and the lie sits so heavily on her tongue that she thinks there's no way he'd ever believe it. But she doesn't back down, she just keeps going, keeps telling her lie with much more coherency than Alex had shown when he was telling the truth. 

She invents deaths for all of them. Says Brad had been swept out to sea when the storm started, that Fliss had been shot as an example, and Conrad had been thrown overboard after talking back one too many times. They're tragic deaths, and Julia hates inventing them. The fact that her lies are still _less_ tragic than the truth makes her want to cry. 

The pirates, she says, had fought among themselves. They'd argued over ransom money, and in the end their leader had shot the other two before Alex was able to push the last one overboard. Julia explains that the two of them hadn't been able to bring themselves to move the bodies below deck--that the corpses of both pirates and friends had been lost before the weather calmed, and a surge of wind and water had almost capsized the _Duke_. When she finally falls silent, the man is staring at her. He has not written any notes in a very long time.

"I will admit," he says at last. "That version of events seems much more likely than the first one we heard. Still, your boyfriend's account did have... superficial similarities to previous intelligence."

"I don't know why Alex said what he did," Julia says. "But we haven't slept since the pirates got onto the _Duke_, they didn't give us anything to eat, and we saw three of our friends _die_."

"Not to mention three pirates," the man reminds her.

Julia frowns. "I don't care about them," she says, bluntly. It's the first completely true thing she's told him--if it hadn't been for those pirates, none of it would have happened. They would have finished their dives, worked their way through Conrad's beer supply, and gotten home safe. "They deserved what they got."

"So _none _of what Alex told us is the truth?" the man asks. He's looking straight at her, his eyes boring into hers.

"We never left the _Duke_," Julia says, looking straight back into his.

And in the end--after several more hours, after more follow up questions, after a whispered consultation with Alex where Julia manages to explain her suspicions and her plan--they decide that they believe Julia more than they believe Alex. They leave the Coast Guard station, and step onto the streets outside, into lives that will never be the same again. 

They still have the things they'd brought onto the _Duke. _Their bags--overpriced gear she'd bought online that had at least lived up to their claim to be waterproof--had survived the storm, and the Coast Guard return them to Julia and Alex when they leave. They have money and ID, and they use that to get a room at the first hotel they find. The two of them drop into bed together without even changing clothes, and sleep for hours.

Julia has nightmares. In the dim, fuzzy moments of clarity after they wake her, before she drops back off again, she hears Alex crying in his sleep.

It's a few days before they head home. They need time to recover before they can face their families again, and (maybe more importantly) to get their stories straight. Julia repeats to Alex what she told to the Coast Guard, and the two of them learn it backwards and forwards. They swear that they'll never tell anyone what really happened. 

Alex is reluctant at first. He tells Julia more than once that he thinks she's being paranoid. But by the time they're on a plane heading home, he's come around.

"There were people watching us," he tells her on the plane, voice quiet so that no one else will hear him. "Following us. Did you see?"

She had. She'd tried to convince herself it was her imagination, but deep down she knows it wasn't. "So what do we do?" she asks, just as quietly.

"We don't tell anyone the truth," Alex said. "Just like we planned." He reaches over, and takes her hand. Julia squeezes his. She's not sure what else she trusts right now, but after everything they've been through together, she knows that she trusts him.

-//-

Their watchers follow them home. Julia sees cars parked outside their apartment for hours at a time, and Alex reports seeing a man in dark sunglasses everywhere he goes on campus. At Conrad's funeral, a man stands several graves away, pretending not to watch. Alex has to hold Julia back from marching over to him and punching him for invading this moment, and intruding on what should have been some chance to get closure on her brother's death.

They agree that she shouldn't go to Brad's funeral. Julia doesn't have a lot of faith in her self control if she sees another silent watcher there.

Weeks pass. Finally, one rainy night as Julia sits alone at a half empty coffee shop on campus, waiting for Alex's class to let out so they can head home together, a stranger slides into the seat across from her. He appears so suddenly that Julia doesn't even see him coming until suddenly he's there, sitting with his hands folded and his eyes fixed on her. Julia feels watched in a way she never has before with any of her other stalkers, she feels _known _when he looks at her, and her skin crawls.

She's nervy after weeks of being watched, and tired of telling lie after lie to her family and friends. Now, confronted with this strange, staring stranger and the judgment in his eyes, Julia snaps. "What do you want?" she demands. "Can't any of you just leave us alone?"

His expression doesn't change, but the judgment in his eyes shifts slightly. He is amused, and that infuriates Julia. "So you _have_ noticed that you're being watched," he says.

"And I want to know why you're doing it," she says. She _thinks _she knows. She thinks that maybe, the lies she'd told to the Coast Guard, the ones she and Alex have been repeating to everyone they meet, aren't good enough after all. That they're still being watched until someone decides they're more trouble than they're worth, and decides to--

To what? That part, she doesn't know. She doesn't think the Coast Guard could do anything to really hurt them, but she also doesn't think the people watching them _are _part of the Coast Guard. Whoever the watchers are, they'd followed them home. And that means it's something much bigger than she'd thought at first.

"I didn't come all the way here to give you answers," the man says. Annoyance creeps into his voice, mixed with just a hint of foreboding. "I hope you understand how inconvenient it is for me to have come here at all."

"How am I supposed to understand that?" Julia snaps. "I don't understand _anything _that's been going on." Too much honesty in that, probably--she moves on quickly. "Who are you, anyway?"

"I am called the Curator," the man says. He pulls a piece of paper from an inner pocket, and slides it across the table toward her. "And as I said, I did not come here to give you answers. I am here to offer you a choice."

Julia looks down at the paper as he talks. It's a single sheet, with a double spaced list of instructions taking up no more than half of it. Julia turns it over, and sees what looks like part of a badly scanned road map. A mess of highways and smaller roads obscure most of the paper, and near the middle of the page a town called Little Hope has been circled twice.

"The choice is simple," the man calling himself the Curator says. "Stay, and let the men that have been following you finish the cover up they started sixty years ago."

Julia's heart jumps.

"Or," he continues. "Run. And find out what happens next."

Her mind races as she stares at the circled town on the paper in front of her. 

"You don't have much time, the Curator says softly, and then Julia hears her name being called out behind her. She jumps slightly, head turning around to see Alex waving at her from the door. 

"Ready to head home?" he asks. "It's raining like crazy out there." 

"I..." She looks back at the table, but the Curator is gone. Only the paper has been left behind, along with his non too subtle hints. Does she trust him? No. Of course not, he'd been _intensely _creepy. But--so are the people watching them. And hadn't Julia suspected from the very beginning that _something _was being covered up?

She feels old, suddenly. A few weeks ago, her biggest problem was trying to stop Conrad from making an ass out of himself, and prepping for their diving trip. Since then, Julia has watched people die in front of her. She's watched her family drift farther away with every lie she tells, she's found herself with nothing and no one in the world that's constant except for herself and Alex.

And she's not even sure about herself, really. Sometimes she looks at herself in the mirror and doesn't know the woman looking back.

Julia makes a snap decision. She grabs her bag and the sheet of paper off the table, and hurries toward a surprised Alex. 

"What's wrong?" he asks.

"We need to leave," she says quickly, almost shoving him out the door. 

"Why? Where--"

"Just... just _trust _me."

There's someone on the street outside, like always, standing on the opposite sidewalk and trying to pretend he's not watching them. Julia barely glances at him, but maybe something in her frantic body language is a signal. As they head down the road, hurrying through crowds of people with umbrellas toward where Alex had parked, she hears a shout. When she looks up, the watcher has pulled a gun, and two more have appeared from nowhere.

Julia and Alex look at each other. The decision has already been made. The two of them turn into the driving rain and wind--and they run.

**Author's Note:**

> Would have really liked to link that ending up to whatever the next game is going to be, but the trailer was light on details and I will probably wimp out of playing it when it comes out (I do not do well with horror), so this is the best I can do.
> 
> Also, apologies for any screw ups or OOCness with this. I played co-op so there are definitely some chunks of the game that I just never saw.


End file.
